Page 172 of Wild Card 13

I glanced toward the mirror. I had done a horrendous job.Maybe clown college in Tampa is my true future,I thought, scrubbing my face down with a makeup removing wipe. I sighed. “Fix me.”

“With pleasure.” She stood and took the mascara from my hand, then turned my chair toward the light with the concentration of someone performing surgery under poor conditions. I sat still while she cleaned the smudge beneath my eye with a cotton swab.

The house made another quiet sound downstairs. Dad moving through the kitchen. Arlo’s voice answered him, lower and amused. The normalness of it pressed gently against the wrongness.

My mother should be here.The thought soaked through me until I was small and young and unfairly heartbroken. She had her own apartment now. Her own dishes. Her own towels. Her own life across town, where cardboard boxes no longer sat half-open in the hallway.

She had asked to see pictures. She had said she couldn’t come help me get ready because things were complicated.

Complicated.The word adults used when they did not want teenagers to understand how thoroughly they had broken something. As if that made absence tidier.

Naomi’s thumb touched my chin, turning my face slightly. “Stop thinking whatever you’re thinking.”

I swallowed, then let myself smile because she was trying. Because I needed her to keep trying. Because if she went soft on me too long, I might start crying before my eyeliner had fully dried.

She finished fixing my makeup and stepped back. “There. Balanced. Elegant. Devastating. Ty Burns is going to forget every word he has ever learned.”

The laugh that escaped me was easier that time. “That would only take a few seconds.”

Footsteps moved through the entryway below. The front door opened. A low murmur of voices followed, but not Ty’s voice. Not that bright, familiar energy that always seemed to enter a house before his body did.

Then Arlo called up, “Lucy?”

I stood too quickly, nearly knocking my knee into the vanity. “What?”

Arlo appeared in my doorway a few seconds later holding a stack of mail.

My little brother was sixteen and already taller than me in a way he enjoyed far too much. He wore dark jeans and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, because Dad had apparently decided prom pictures required every man in the house to dress for the occasion.

He held one envelope apart from the others. White. Thick. Creamy paper. My name and address printed across the front. In the upper left corner, in deep navy ink, were the words Aldenmere University.

For a second, the entire room narrowed to the envelope in Arlo’s hand. Naomi whispered something. I didn’t catch it. My pulse moved everywhere at once. Throat. Wrists. Ribs. The backs of my knees. I stared at the envelope like if I looked too directly, it might disappear, like hope was a skittish thing that would bolt if startled.

Arlo stepped inside slowly. “This came.”

I couldn’t move.

He looked down at the envelope, then back at me. His face softened with the kind of protective tenderness he usually tried to disguise under irritation. “Want me to leave it here?”

“No.” My voice came out thin. “No, I?—”

Arlo crossed the room and handed me the envelope. The paper was heavier than I expected. Warm from his hand. Real. My name sat in the center like it belonged there, like some version of me had already left this room and made it all the way to Boston.

Dad appeared behind Arlo in the hall. He must have seen my face because he stopped immediately.

The silence stretched long enough for the house to settle around it. Sunlight through my window. The faint smell of hairspray. The curling iron clicking as it cooled on the vanity. Naomi’s hand around mine. My prom dress waiting in a green shimmer over the chair.

I looked down at the envelope and pressed my thumb over the seal.

Dad’s voice was quiet. “Sweetheart, you don’t have to open it right now.”

Arlo leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “For the record,if they said no, I can have a strongly worded letter drafted by dinner.”

“You cannot threaten an admissions office.”

Dad’s mouth twitched, but his eyes stayed on me.

I slid one finger beneath the flap. The paper tore softly. My hands were shaking now. There was no controlling it. No hiding it. The envelope opened too slowly and too quickly at once, and when I pulled the folded letter free, the Aldenmere crest gleamed at the top in navy and gold.